Changing external assembly reference in Maps & Orchestrations

What do you do if for some reasons you have to change the name of external assembly that is being referenced by Maps and Orchestrations? The change can be for reasons like:

1) New SNK was created and hence the Public Token key changed. (Very rare to happen)

2) For some reasons the name of external assembly have to be changed. (We had to do this in our project. This was done in order to adhere to naming standards of Biztalk artifacts)

Standard way of doing this can be really tedious. As one have to go to each map and click on each "Functoid" and go to properties to change to new "Assembly name". Same thing will need to be done for Orchestrations.

If like us you have 20 maps with average 30 functoids per maps and 20 orchestrations then you need to keep 2 days aside for this "boring" job!

The second option can make your life easy and get you up and running in 30 mts as compared to 2 days. This is what you do:

1) Open the Map/Orchestration in Text Editor (Ultra Edit in our case)

2) Do a Find and replace in the whole file. "Find" "old assembly.dll" replace with "new assembly.dll".

3) Replacement will be done for "Assembly", "Class" and "Assembly Path" in the file.

4) Save the file and you are all set!! That easy!

Care should be taken while doing this operation as it is large scale "find" and "replace" operation.